“No evidence she had any knowledge of the Islington address or was ever near the place,” the Assistant Commissioner remarked, but was plainly disturbed by the suggestion.
“Is this Mrs. Ronald Owen the passionate, revengeful type?” someone else asked Bobby, and Bobby, uncomfortably remembering Cora’s smouldering eyes and dark and brooding personality, had to take refuge in declaring that he had seen so little of her, and knew so little of her character, that he did not feel justified in replying.
But they were all evidently aware of his hesitation, and the Assistant Commissioner offered suddenly to take him off the case and assign him to other duties, if he so desired. Bobby answered, however, with all his native instinct of persistence, that he would prefer to continue. He said aloud:
“If I may say so, sir, any suggestion that this was an isolated act of passion or revenge by a jealous woman ignores the connection with other cases that seems fairly well established.”
The Assistant Commissioner agreed that that was so, someone else pointed out that such connection was purely a matter of surmise and might not exist in fact, and there followed a good deal of somewhat desultory talk about Percy Lawrence, his record of such singular recklessness and violence, and about Alice Yates, known as Slimmy Alice, as an accomplice, and as possibly identical with the unknown woman who had passed as Ronnie Owen’s wife.
“It seems Lawrence has insured his own life for this same figure of £20,000 that keeps continually turning up,” the Assistant Commissioner remarked. “Is that a blind, or does it mean he is intended to be the next? If it’s like that, there’s someone else behind the whole affair. And, judging from Lawrence’s record, he is the sort of man who might be jolly useful at first and then turn nasty and have to be got rid of when he got to know too much.”
Bobby wondered silently if this remark indicated a line of inquiry it might be wise to follow up, and then another of those present said abruptly:
“Owen, did you say this Mr. Dick Norris told you he was insured for the same amount?”
“Yes, sir, that is so,” Bobby answered; and the members of the conference all looked blankly at each other, as if asking what that could mean, and one of them mentioned in an abstracted sort of way that apparently Mr. Norris was in touch with the Berry, Quick Syndicate, if it was right that a letter of theirs had been seen by Bobby in Norris’s Park Lane flat.
After that there was a good deal of desultory talk, and Bobby was told he could go for the present, but was to remain available for further instructions if any were thought necessary. So he retired to the canteen for a cup of tea, and over it he began to wonder again how the unknown, whose figure seemed to loom in such dark terror behind all this series of deaths – and who might perhaps be Lawrence himself, but who might also be someone of whom as yet they had no knowledge – managed to get in touch with his victims. They appeared to be carefully selected, but Bobby did not quite see what method of choice could be used. He was still trying to solve the problem when he was joined by Inspector Ferris, who had been acting as secretary to the recent conference.
“They’ve broken up and all gone home,” he explained. “Want some part of Sunday for themselves. It’ll take me pretty near to midnight to get it all down.”
Bobby expressed polite and respectful sympathy, and Ferris, who had ordered tea for himself, went on:
“Worrying case. You’re up against it all right when you have to tackle things so long after they’ve all happened. Witnesses lost, memories gone, everything dispersed. You’re to have another try at the Islington address to see if something useful can’t be picked up. It must have made a bit of a stir among the neighbours; some of them may be able to remember something to help. After that, tackle this Dr. Beale – doctor of philosophy, isn’t he? What’s that mean?”
“Oh,” answered Bobby, “it means he’s made philosophy his special subject, and, after taking his degree at the university, he wrote something original – either in the way of theory or research – and put it in, and it was thought good enough to give him his doctorate on. It just means he’s good at it, that’s all; a recognized authority.”
“I suppose you’ve studied it, too?” Ferris suggested. “It means proving that everything isn’t what it looks like, so it’s all just the same and nothing to worry about?”
“Well, I suppose it’s a bit like that,” agreed Bobby, “but I never went in for it much. Beale talked about Hegel’s realism, and a chap called Spinoza, and monads, I think it was, unless I’ve got it mixed somehow. I just know their names – Hegel’s and Spinoza’s, I mean – but that’s about all. I’ll try to look it up a bit before I go to see Beale.”
“Good idea,” applauded Ferris. “You can often get a man to talk by showing you know something about whatever he’s interested in. I remember once getting a lot of useful information out of a fellow by letting him see I was nearly as well up in shove-ha’penny as he was himself. Did you know there were fresh reports in about Lawrence and his girl friend, Alice What’s-her-name?”
“Anything important?” Bobby asked eagerly.
“Dashed queer, anyhow,” answered Ferris. “The girl’s given us the slip. Paid up at her Notting Hill lodgings. Paid a week in advance instead of notice and went off, and that’s all we know.”
“Looks as if she had taken alarm; knew she was being watched and decided to clear,” observed Bobby.
“That’s right,” agreed Ferris. “The funny thing is, and her with her record, her landlady’s so sorry to lose such a nice, quiet, steady, respectable young lady, so different from the flighty girls most arc today, and never even used so much as a dab of powder on her nose.”
‘‘Is that what the landlady said?” asked Bobby.
‘“Pretty near word for word what she told Higson,” Ferris answered. “Anyway, she’s done a bunk – back to her old trade, most likely. We are instructing the men round Leicester Square way to look out for her again.” Bobby said nothing, but somehow he did not think that idea probable. Why, he did not know, but the impression was strong in his mind that Alice Yates had done with all that, even if it was possible she had adopted an even grimmer trade in its place.
“If it’s like that,” Ferris continued, “we shall soon pick her up again, and then perhaps she’ll be willing to talk. Or, again, she may simply have changed her lodgings, and means to turn up at the office tomorrow same as before.”
“Doesn’t seem likely,” commented Bobby. “I should say it looks more as if she had made up her mind to go while the going was good, and we shall hear nothing more of her.”
“Dare say you’re right,” agreed Ferris, “and I shouldn’t wonder if Lawrence hasn’t done the same. Tomorrow most likely we shall find the office closed, and Lawrence leaving the country right under our noses and us not able to say a word. The report about him’s queer, too. You remember, first report was he made a practice of going out for about three hours every night – eight to eleven regular – then home and to bed like clockwork. Well, now it seems all he did every night, without fail, rain, hail, or snow, fog or clear, was to walk to Kew, round by Acton, and back home – about twelve or fifteen miles heel-and-toe walking, and never a stop all the way. What’s that for, if anything?” Bobby was puzzled, and said so.
Ferris suggested an explanation himself.
“Knew he was being followed, and thought he would give our chaps a bit of a chase,” he said, “only it seems like it’s been going on for some time. Man on beat out Acton way got to know him quite well, and wondered what his hurry was. He had been noticed other places, too – taximen in Bayswater thought he was training for a London to Brighton record. Our men say they’ve lost pounds following him, and they mean to put in for a special allowance for boots worn out. Here’s another odd bit, too. Slimmy Alice’s lodgings were in Notting Hill, you know, and every night about eight, and about eleven, she used to go out for a quarter of an hour or so – never longer. She walked as far as the Bayswater Road Lawrence always wen
t along, coming and going. They never took any notice of each other. They mightn’t ever have seen each other before. But there she always was as he passed by.”
“They never spoke?”
“Not so much as a word or a look. After he passed, she always went straight back home – the last time straight to bed. And he always went straight on, same heel-and-toe business, back to his room off the Edgware Road and straight to bed, too – as innocent as you please. Something behind it all right,” opined Ferris, “only what?”
CHAPTER 14
THE COFFEE STALL
It was a warm, fine evening, not yet very late, and Bobby, leaving Scotland Yard, turned to the left and, deep in troubled thought, walked slowly along the Thames Embankment.
Why had the girl Alice Yates disappeared, and what significance, if any, had her departure from her lodgings?
Had she taken alarm and gone back to her old, sad trade, as Ferris believed? But Bobby’s vivid memory of her manner towards him, of the strange way in which she had regarded him, was still fresh in his mind, and did not seem to him to accord well with the easy explanation Ferris had put forward. Her eyes had shown fear indeed, but not the fear that seeks escape in easy flight; rather, indeed, the fear that so keys itself up to meet threatening danger it is transmuted into a higher courage. In her manner, too, there had been a profound appeal, but not the kind of appeal Ferris had in mind. Bobby still remembered the impression she had made on him of something in her profound and elementary, as of a peculiar, purposed gravity.
But, then, how to reconcile that with her presence in the office of the Berry, Quick Syndicate, about which were gathering clouds of such dark suspicion, or even with her present disappearance?
Then, too, what could be the meaning of this odd tale of Lawrence’s apparently purposeless walks, fifteen miles or so every night in three hours?
No wonder the man looked lean, but what could be his object?
Again Bobby rejected as totally inadequate the simple explanation that Lawrence was merely amusing himself by inflicting long, aimless walks on the police officers he knew to be watching him. The grim, absorbed, indifferent personality of Lawrence suggested no childish pleasantries of that kind. Connected with these walks of his, too, whatever their purpose, was the incidental puzzle of Alice Yates’s nightly excursions, twice every evening, coincident with Lawrence’s passage, going and coming, along the Bayswater Road. Apparently no signal or sign of recognition had been detected passing between them, but, then, that signal might simply be a mutual awareness, unacknowledged, each of the other’s presence. Or, again, it might be that the girl was charged with the mission of reporting that Lawrence passed that way at certain hours.
Only what significance could that fact have, and who could want to be informed of it, and why?
An insoluble puzzle, Bobby found it, and was inclined to think no answer was possible till more pieces were at hand to fit into the jigsaw. Instead, he turned his mind to that aspect of the problem which had been mentioned at the conference as crucial – the establishing of the identity of the other victims. Dr. Ambrose Beale, on his return, would be able most likely to give full information about one, though the fact that in that case the death had apparently taken place on the Continent would again hamper the investigation. But how to find out anything about the others?
Even about the death of Ronnie nothing might ever have been known but for the accident of the signet ring having been sent to Lord Hirlpool. No one had connected with him the newspaper paragraphs concerning the fatal accident to a Ronald Oliver, so completely had Ronnie cut himself off from his wife and friends and former life. Only too probably the other victims, if victims they were, had done the same thing and also deliberately cut themselves entirely adrift.
Leaning against the parapet with his back to the river, Bobby watched how, in the darkness of the night that now had fallen, there drifted by a shadowy procession of the lost, of the outcast, of the disinherited, of those who had fallen or been thrown from their places in a society that knew them no more – men and women shuffling by like ghosts of their own past, like phantoms of the dead waiting only a signal to return to the graves they had deserted.
There came into Bobby’s mind the conviction that it would be possible to find here those for whom no inquiry would ever be made – as no inquiry had ever been made, apparently, for two at least of the victims of these accidents in baths, as no inquiry would have been made into Ronnie’s death but for his signet ring having come into a relative’s possession.
Perhaps in the gloom of some other night another had leaned as he was doing upon the parapet, back to the river, and watched that shadowy line of the lost trailing aimlessly by, and watched them with the appraising eye of the butcher searching out the fattest sheep for the slaughterhouse.
Bobby had strong nerves enough, and the night was warm and calm, but he felt himself shivering now with a cold that seemed to penetrate to his bones.
A short distance farther on was a coffee stall with a little group of men clustered near, some of them customers, some looking longingly in the hope that a cup of coffee or a bun might come their way, or even a stray cigarette that means almost as much.
With that chill still in his bones, the thought of a cup of hot coffee seemed attractive to Bobby, and then, as he walked towards the stall, he thought suddenly that here was the very spot where such a dark messenger of death as his imagination pictured, chooser of the slain like the Valkyr of ancient legend, might first begin to search.
Bobby knew the coffee-stall keeper well. His name was Young – George Young – though he was more generally known as “Cripples”; so much so, indeed, that only a few were aware of his actual name, and he himself would often sign receipts or notes with the word “Cripples,” as though it were his proper title. He owed it to the fact that he had but one eye – he had lost the other in a fight with a customer who had wished to be served without payment – one arm – he had lost the other in the accident in a Durham coal-mine that had driven him from his occupation of collier to that of coffee-stall keeper, the compensation he had received providing the capital necessary for a start – and one leg – the other having been amputated after a young gentleman returning from a cocktail party in a sports car had charged him and his coffee stall at sixty m.p.h. It was an accident for which the victim had received no compensation, as the young gentleman was under twenty-one, had forgotten to renew his accident insurance policy, and had a father unable to accept further financial responsibility since he was faced with the necessity of buying a new sports car to make up for that the coffee stall had ruined beyond repair.
However, an unusually severe magistrate had fined the young gentleman £5 and warned him sternly about what might happen another time, and Cripples’s own savings had proved just sufficient to start him in business again, so the incident had ended well enough.
The appearance of Bobby, who was himself fairly well known, whose tall form and disciplined bearing would in any case have borne their own warning with them, caused a certain ebbing movement among a few of the stall’s customers, and Cripples’s one eye was alight with suspicion as he handed Bobby the cup of coffee and ham sandwich asked for. Bobby was well aware that questioning Cripples was a process calling for much tact and patience if it were not to come up against the blank wall of his famous “Well, I don’t just rightly remember”; and for the present, as he directed his attention to working his way through his sandwich – a formidable affair of a slice of cold bacon, “ham” being a purely courtesy term, inserted between the two halves of an enormously thick and long roll – he contented himself with complimenting Cripples on the dexterity with which he made his one arm do the work of two.
“Why not try an artificial arm, though?” he asked. “They fix up wonderful contraptions nowadays.”
“Did once,” Cripples answered briefly. “It hurt like fun, and I get along all right. Lucky,” he added, “it was left arm and right leg – keeps you from be
ing lopsided like.”
“Yes, I suppose there’s that,” agreed Bobby, still manfully facing up to his ham sandwich.
“I don’t deny as, taking it all round, I’ve had my share of luck,” Cripples admitted gratefully, and hopped away to the other end of the stall to serve a new customer.
“How’s business?” Bobby asked him when he returned.
In reply, Cripples admitted cautiously that it was not so bad but that it might be worse, and not so good but that it might be better.
“Want anything more?” he asked, noticing that the ham sandwich was beginning to show signs of admitting defeat and adding a broad hint that the presence of a “busy” never tended to improve business. “Makes the boys nervous like,” he explained.
“They needn’t be,” Bobby assured him. “I’m not looking for anyone who could be here, only for someone I know isn’t and can’t be.”
Cripples did not ask for any explanation. He had noticed that the explanations of police officers tended to be unsatisfactory. Bobby finished his coffee and asked for another cup.
“I thought it was going to be fatal, judging from the first taste,” he remarked, “but as I’ve survived that one, I’ll risk another.”
“Best cup of coffee on the Embankment,” declared Cripples with emphasis. “Why, when it’s closing time at the Savoy, up the street there, all the toffs come down here for a taste of the genuine. Line up for it, they do.”
The Bath Mysteries Page 11